Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Tang avoided another jail sentence but soon found that he was detained wherever he went. He could hold a job for only a matter of months before the local authorities discovered him and forced him back to his home city. No one wanted to be responsible for keeping tabs on an activist. Tang moved from city to city, up and down China’s coastline.

  Finally, when he had been arrested so many times he was losing count, a man in an interrogation room was honest with him. “Do you know who we are?” the man asked.

  “The police?” said Tang.

  “No,” the man said. “We’re the State Security Bureau. You know, you’re never going to be able to live anywhere in China.”

  Tang executes a practiced shrug at this point in telling his story. “They were going to arrest me no matter where I went.”

  After this, in 2001, Tang decided to swim to Taiwan. It was an escape plan worthy of a suspense film—he was still young enough to be foolhardy. He hoped he might swim to the closest island in the chain, a little patch of rocks that Taiwan fought for in 1949, just around fourteen thousand feet from Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian Province in Mainland China. Dadan Island has an area of just under a square kilometer, with a stretch of beach on one side and rocky cliffs on the other.

  Tang thought that if he made his home in Taiwan, he might be able to sneak back into China every once in a while. He could swim back, join whatever democracy effort was under way, and then escape back to safety. It was an outlandish dream, one in which he was safe but still relevant, an important member of an underground movement rather than a stubborn holdout.

  Tang traveled to Xiamen with the barest outline of a plan. Xiamen is separated from Dadan Island by a strip of water that is not, to a man intent on escaping China, insurmountable. Tang took tourist boats around the bay, circling an island that was closer in, still part of Mainland China. He took notes on the coast guard patrols and realized they took a lunch break in the middle of the day. He contemplated jumping off the boat, swimming for the island outlined in the distance. It wouldn’t work. It was too far—even if he was confident he could make the swim without drowning, the bigger boats could easily call in the coast guard before he reached the rocks. He needed another plan.

  Tang walked Xiamen’s docks for a few days before he decided his best option was to dupe a fisherman. He picked out a man with a little white boat, not too fancy but new enough that it looked capable of making its way out of the protected bay onto the open ocean. He told the man that he and his friends wanted to go out on a fishing expedition—the man might suspect him if he admitted he was making the trip alone. He offered a price that was high but not outlandish. And the next morning, when Tang’s friends failed to materialize, he made a show out of it. “Well, you already have my money,” he said, palms open in his retelling, eyes wide and innocent. “We might as well go out.”

  The boat chugged out past the near island and came to rest in a spot so close to the target island that he could see rocks breaking out of the water. It would be an easy swim. It was midday, and the coast guard would be eating lunch. Tang pretended to have a gun. He told the fisherman to stay behind the wheel of the boat. “I killed a man!” he shouted to him. “Don’t come out here!” Tang had put all his important documents in a fanny pack wrapped in plastic, which he threw into the water ahead of him. He dove, grabbed the bag, and swam hard before he had the courage to look back—the fisherman was peering over the side of the boat curiously, checking to see whether Tang would drown.

  The inlet that Tang Yuanjun aimed for in his swim was rocky, and he cut himself climbing out of the water. He lay out in the sun to dry and looked back at the coast of China. It was hazy and far off. He had never been anywhere else. Despite all his plans to sneak back in, he had a feeling that this first look at China from over the border would be his last. He sat there waiting to dry, gazing back at the silhouette of his country. He baked in the sun for half an hour until a soldier spotted him from a ridge above the beach. “Who are you?” the soldier shouted. “What are you doing?”

  Tang shouted his answer, explaining he was defecting. There was a slight pause, and then the soldier shouted, “Swim back!”

  * * *

  • • •

  One of the first China Democracy Parties that Tang encountered in the United States was not so much a political organization as it was an immigration agency. The man running the party had approached Tang at a rally in Times Square, where exiled dissidents were commemorating the massacre at Tiananmen. The man had slipped through the crowd, half-protesting, half-networking. He shook Tang’s hand and said he was looking for real, honest-to-goodness dissidents to come speak to his group of immigrants. Tang agreed to be a speaker.

  He showed up at the man’s office, and as the meeting progressed toward his planned appearance, he realized it was a sham. These people, in their asylum cases, would claim to be so dedicated to democracy that they would face persecution if they returned to China. They would back up their claim by documenting their attendance at these meetings. But here in this office, the discussion was focused on issues of immigration. These party members would get their asylum knowing barely more about the oppression, human rights activism, and political movements within China than they had when they walked in.

  It was a disappointment, but the meeting in that office gave Tang insight into his own character. He did not mind working odd jobs, delivering food, fixing cars, and surviving in the fashion of an everyday Flushing immigrant. But it wasn’t the life he had dreamed of. Tang was made to be a democracy activist. It was his benzhi gongzuo, his most essential work.

  By the time Zhuang arrived in Flushing, Tang’s office was attracting a steady mix of dissidents, curious young people, and hopeful asylees. In addition to the veterans of Tiananmen Square, the China Democracy Party supporters, and the other dissidents who had arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, a new group of activists had started to trickle into New York in the late 2000s: people whose houses had been knocked down and who had moved (sometimes forcibly) to cheap housing on the outskirts of their cities. The process was so common in China that the new activists could efficiently sum up their stories of demolition, poor government compensation, and relocation in two words: chai qian.

  In 2013 an activist named Ma Yongtian arrived in the United States and found a spot at Tang’s folding table. Ma was a middle-aged woman with a short, practical haircut and the blunt, confrontational manner of a hardened businesswoman. She had been building her fortune in northeastern China by manufacturing funerary urns—Tang Dynasty style, an ancient and expensive-looking mix of yellow, brown, and green—when the local government sold the land under her factory, illegally, to a developer. They turned off the water and cut the electricity. They sent thugs to try to intimidate Ma Yongtian. She had fought for over a decade, joining the ranks of China’s petitioners—people who traveled back and forth to Beijing in a Sisyphean attempt to alert China’s central government to local injustice. Ma sued the developer in a local court, and won, but nothing was done to enforce the court’s ruling. When she tried to petition in Beijing, agents from her hometown intercepted her on multiple occasions, throwing her into “black jails”—extrajudicial detention sites set up to thwart petitioners like her—and forcing her to return home. By the time she arrived in New York, Ma’s lips were frozen in a line of grim determination.

  The chai qian activists, all with stories similar to Ma’s, had been content enough as Chinese citizens until their local government bulldozed their homes in the name of new developments, roads, rail lines, and real estate profits. Together they were an outraged and confrontational group, one time even marching into the Chinese consulate and getting into a shoving match with one of their guards. Ma Yongtian had, by 2014, established a reputation for throwing herself in front of the cars of visiting Chinese dignitaries.

  She and her friends wore their convictions on their sleeves, but Tan
g’s office had also become a center for immigrants who were still wary of protest. They were economic migrants who had arrived at Tang’s doorstep out of curiosity or opportunism. A number came on the instructions of their asylum lawyers, looking to build a case of persecution. While this group had, at first, disillusioned him, Tang had come to regard educating these asylum seekers as one of his most important duties. Some came to their first Democracy Party meeting having no clue about what had happened to the students at Tiananmen Square. It had been wiped from China’s history books. It was not, Tang realized, the dissidents in exile who needed to learn about democracy. It was the regular immigrants, people who might not understand that many activists were still being jailed, who might not know the real hardships of China in the twentieth century—the famines, political purges, and corruption cases. He hoped that after a year or two, his members would be able to look past propaganda and hope for change. Asylum was a side effect, the great gray area of running a Democracy Party.

  Not everyone understood the way that Tang embraced these members. It was not his business, he explained, to pick apart their motives. “People are complicated,” he said. “If you say they are here just for their asylum case, that’s not true. But if you say they are not here for their asylum case, that’s not true.” Even if the people who showed up in his office did not face persecution in China, even if they couldn’t care less about democracy, they would attend his meetings for months. And if they took what he said to heart, they could face persecution in China all the same.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang Liehong was interested in the question of democracy in China, but he had arrived in the United States determined not to join anyone else’s movement. He was dedicated to one cause, and that was Wukan. He didn’t trust the other dissidents in Flushing; he was wary they would use his story to promote themselves.

  Zhuang did strive to befriend anyone with a connection to his old life. When the Chinese assistant of a German journalist he had met in Wukan arrived in New York to attend graduate school, Zhuang invited her out to Flushing and gifted her with tea. A Chinese documentary filmmaker came to New York, and Zhuang offered her a foldout cot on the floor of his single room. He kept up persistent contact, e-mailing, texting, and inviting his few friends to tea. Through these efforts, he established a small network of students and journalists—but there were drawbacks to such friends. None of them lived in Flushing. Some were immigrants, but they lived differently from Zhuang, passing through New York temporarily, showing up at Zhuang’s apartment for a few days and then moving on. One woman, a Chinese-American translator named Sophie, grew concerned that Zhuang was too isolated. She suggested that he introduce himself to Tang Yuanjun.

  Zhuang protested, privately, that he was not interested in joining anyone else’s group. But he had only so many friends, and Sophie was one of them. He decided it would be rude not to take her advice. So in June of his and Little Yan’s first year, Zhuang took Little Yan out to the China Democracy Party headquarters. He located the space on Google Maps, tucked into an aging, stout office building not far from the entrance to the Flushing Library and just past a sidewalk that was wet and cluttered with wooden boxes of grocery store bulk items.

  The office Tang had rented on the second floor of the little building was accessible by two tiny elevators or by a stairwell with doors that slammed shut with a loud, violent clang that reverberated through the halls of the floors below and above it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang and Little Yan trudged down their street in the cold and caught a city bus, a mode of transportation they were still adjusting to, memorizing stops as they went. Despite his protestations, he entertained the idea that he might find a community of like-minded people at the China Democracy Party. At least, he hoped people would give him the kind of reception he had envisioned before coming to the United States. Little Yan slipped after him quietly, in winter boots that added to her height with a few inches of platform heel, her ability to negotiate the icy sidewalks one of those little miracles performed by determined women.

  They pushed past the mail center on the first floor and into the little elevator. Zhuang took in the space: a nice office with big windows that looked out onto the snowy street. He saw the scores of folded-up plastic and metal chairs lining the walls, the plastic folding table for visitors, the rolled-up years of protest banners stacked against the windows.

  It was an off day, and Tang Yuanjun was there alone. He was puttering on a computer under a poster of Abraham Lincoln that read, in English, WHEN I DO GOOD, I FEEL GOOD. WHEN I DO BAD, I FEEL BAD. THAT IS MY RELIGION.

  Tang stood up and greeted Zhuang and Little Yan warmly. “Sit down, sit down,” he told them. “Would you like some tea?” He poured into paper cups from a glass carafe in the center of the table. He sat down on one of the folding chairs and asked Zhuang, “Do you need help finding a lawyer?”

  Zhuang said he didn’t. He had his own lawyer already.

  “Do you need any help with your case?” asked Tang.

  “No,” said Zhuang.

  They talked a little bit about Wukan. They talked a bit about Zhuang’s plans, and Zhuang was evasive. He was waiting until his asylum claim was settled, he said. He wasn’t worried about work.

  Tang nodded, quietly. It was still early days. Zhuang was still expecting America to accommodate him. He was still full of bold ideas. “He had a lot of plans,” Tang would say later. “He was still a little unrealistic.”

  It was not the reception that Zhuang had hoped for. Tang was warm, but he had seen his fair share of newly arrived dissidents. Zhuang did not get the sense that he was a celebrated visitor. A few people came and went, mostly to ask about their asylum cases. After about an hour, Zhuang and Little Yan took the rickety elevator back down, feeling doubtful. He didn’t need Tang’s help. He had his own network. He had the same sense Tang remembers from his first Flushing Democracy Party experience—that the people attending Tang’s meetings were not there for democracy at all.

  Zhuang did not want to get caught up in someone else’s problems. He had his own asylum case to make, but he wouldn’t need anyone to help him prove his devotion to freedom and democracy. He had his own plans, his own glory to chase down. He would make a life in the United States and send money back to friends and family. He would write a book and start a company. He was determined to go it alone.

  7

  Sanctuary

  避难所 / Bìnànsuŏ

  SPRING–WINTER 2014

  Sitting on the corner of Kissena Boulevard and Main Street, an off-kilter intersection that requires multiple street crossings just to proceed in a straight line, an older woman spends most days standing underneath a traffic signal, peering out from under a visor and repeating a message over a bullhorn. “Green card! Marriage license! Immigration! Visa! Asylum!” The metallic-sounding voice has the same lilt that street vendors in China use to advertise a cart of fruit.

  Zhuang’s agenda, on his very first day in New York, started with obtaining a green card. Over years of researching land sales and drawing up petitions, he had developed a preoccupation with documentation. He wanted official recognition for his own sense of security and so he and Little Yan could apply to bring their son over to join them. The first step would be an asylum application for himself and Little Yan. On his second morning, he sat on my sofa in Brooklyn and asked me for help.

  My own understanding of the U.S. asylum process was not much better than Zhuang’s. With him looking over my shoulder, I Googled “asylum lawyer New York” and came up with a handful of offices in Flushing. I called one, and a secretary answered the phone in Mandarin. “I have a friend who is looking to apply,” I told her.

  “No problem,” she said, switching to English. “We generally charge eight thousand dollars for an asylum case.” The cost might go up, she explained, if Zh
uang needed to appear in court to defend his case. I thanked her and hung up.

  When I told Zhuang the price I had been quoted, his jaw dropped. He had expected to file the papers himself. He thought it would be cheap or even free. He wondered if he was missing something. “I bet Chen Guangcheng didn’t pay for a lawyer,” he said, mentioning a famous Chinese exile, a blind human rights activist who spent years in prison and under house arrest. Chen had grown so famous in his government-enforced isolation that even the actor Christian Bale had attempted to meet him, arriving with a film crew from CNN that captured Bale getting pushed around by a potbellied man in a long green army coat. In the end, Chen had escaped house arrest and taken refuge in the American embassy, causing a brief diplomatic crisis. Zhuang was always comparing himself to Chen Guangcheng.

  I told Zhuang I would look for organizations that provided legal aid while he asked around in Flushing. A few weeks in, all the organizations I called had no space to take on any additional clients. Zhuang came back after investigating his for-profit options—the law offices that operated out of Flushing and Chinatown and catered to Chinese customers. He confirmed the price I had been quoted. Asylum, in all of Manhattan’s Chinatowns, was a booming business.

  * * *

  • • •

  New York City is estimated to have more undocumented immigrants than any other metropolitan area in the United States. It is a “sanctuary city”—the police force does not arrest individuals because they lack documentation, and they do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when it comes to tracking down and deporting immigrants. A mix of local organizations offer free legal services to recent arrivals. A quick, incomplete survey included Catholic Charities, Cabrini Immigrant Services, Human Rights First, UN Local, the Legal Aid Society, Safe Horizon Immigration Law Project, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. I filled out intake forms, called branch offices, and asked friends if they knew any immigration lawyers. One organization would get back to me nearly eight months later—a spot had finally opened up.